I admire Brittany Maynard. The 29-year-old Oregon woman and terminal
brain cancer sufferer took a doctor-sanctioned lethal concoction
Saturday, ending her life when and where she wanted — at home in her bed
with her family surrounding her.

A community already known for its poverty
and rampant drug use and its less-than-stellar track
record of public education and housing doesn’t need the stench of
rapists added to its long list of ills and
woes.

Ebola is the sad repeat of what happened with
the outbreak of AIDS nearly 30 years ago: The Western world watched
while poor, untreated black Africans died, usually alone and shamed by
the social stigmas associated with the trifling nature of the disease.

The mounting evidence of the NFL’s
epidemic scourge of employing women and children batterers as highly
paid professional football players has been a perfect storm resulting in
my decision to boycott professional football.

On Sept. 8, Hamilton County Juvenile
Court Judge Tracie Marie Hunter will finally walk from the court of
public opinion into the Hamilton County Common Pleas courtroom of Judge
Norbert A. Nadel to defend herself, her reputation, her seat on the
bench and, she’d tell us, her life’s work against nine felony charges.

As the days turn a way from Michael
Brown’s funeral, thus finally laying to rest his thrice-autopsied young
body, Ferguson, Missouri, is now — more than ever — ripe and ready for
the change that can carry this predominantly black and woefully
underemployed community forever forward.

You wouldn’t know it now to look at the
so-fresh-and-so-clean-clean landscape where Timothy Thomas died and potentially
thousands rioted, faced down cops in riot gear and incurred bean bag
spray, rubber bullets, mace and mayhem, but we were once a bigger, more
metropolitan version of Ferguson, Missouri, and our nighttime streets
ran thick with anger, too.